Burlington vt gay bars

Craig McGaughan planned to name the bar “Mister Sister,” which critics denounced as a transphobic slur.

The Pride Center hosted a forum on the bar in March 2017. It's not a gay bar, but it's very popular with the lgbtq+Q+ community. They don’t need your gay bar for everything,” Mattson said. And, I mean, that was backtracking six months of bills,” he said. 

The bar was on the market for three years before Toms gave up on selling the business and just sold the building.

Red Square: A bustling bar and live music venue, Red Square has a diverse crowd and often hosts lgbtq+Q+-friendly events. They pointed out that, as a nonprofit, the center can cater to people of all ages and interests, including sober people.

But they said any attempt to compare an organization like the Pride Center with a bar is “apples and oranges.”

“A bar adds something that’s very specific and, yes, it adds a lot of flavor and some social diversity to, you know, a very rural state with not a lot of things on its social calendar,” they said.

Mattson said it’s a “historical accident” that LGBTQ+ people have bars as the primary site to serve the community — which are private businesses, not nonprofits that could qualify for government grants or donations.

“We were always barely making ends meet,” Toms said. 

“We did everything we can to be creative, like a pride celebration would ultimately help clean us up from the bad winter here. You should be in the women’s room,” according to Toms.

“And I took the signs off the doors, and I just said, ‘Sorry, we have gender-neutral bathrooms now,’” he said.

I can’t keep my eyes open past 9,” he said. “And I felt like I could do that more authentically in my own space.”

Opening a queer bar also meant contending with issues that the average business may not face — such as protecting the clientele’s safety. And I find that to be sad,” he said. “I just could not understand our own discrimination that existed within that community.

And if a place isn’t making a good faith effort to have gender-neutral restrooms, or to use people’s pronouns correctly, or to have programming that acknowledges queer people of color, even in a very white state like Vermont, then young people and progressive queers will not come.”

That starts with the name: The term “gay bar” has fallen out of favor somewhat, replaced by “queer bar” or other terms that encompass a wide spectrum of gender identity and sexuality. 

Mattson said he does not envy bar owners who have to navigate the language of older generations “for whom queer is a slur that causes triggering trauma,” as well as the younger generations “for whom queer is an essential naming that describes an inclusive place.”

The shifting dynamics within the LGBTQ+ community was one challenge Robert Toms faced when he ran 135 Pearl, the gay bar in Burlington that closed in 2006.

Toms was 23 when he arrived in Vermont with plans to wait tables at Red Lobster while he saved up for a chance to open up a black box theater in Burlington.

Their everyday conversations about their lives, embracing other people and building trust frequently challenge the assumptions people have about the LGBTQ+ community “by really just getting to know each other.”

“It’s been awesome to witness people saying, ‘I had this opinion of gay people, but like, you’ve actually really helped me pick up on that and change the way I think about gay people,’” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misrendered the name of the former Burlington bar Pearls.